Statistics and Last Night on Earth

[fitzgrimm]

I was procrastinating the other day, I really did not want to study of Anatomy, and with the help of excel answered the most asked question by my gaming group when we play Last Night on Earth.

My group always seems to ask at least once a game what are the odds of that? This comes up for one of two reasons. The first is that the heroes need to find something and are not getting lucky on their draws. For example they are looking for the gas or townsfolk and just can’t seem to draw them. The second is that the zombie player does something to piss the hero players off, such as playing locked door twice on the same hero.

The reason I bring this up is I don’t know if there would be any interest in having it posted.

[scarydk]

Please do. I'm a big fan of numbers and stats and would love to see what other guys do to track their games.

[StayPuft]

Actually, I don't know if that actually is really interesting, or if the three of us are just apparently huge nerds (LOL!)...

But I would be really interested to see that too.

[sickboy]

I love metagame stuff. I once saw a feature on monopoly and how the pinks are the best properties to own because they're right after jail and statistically the jail square has the highest probability of being landed on. Boring to some, I found it fascinating.

To work out the probability just divide the number of instances of the target card in the deck, by the total number of cards in the deck.

So if there are two of the desired card in a deck of fifty cards the odds are 1/25 or 0.04 (i.e. 4% of draws will pull the right card).

[friskers96]

The odds on card draws are going to fluctuate per person depending on their set and how they use their cards. Figuring odds should be pretty simple I think, if you have 6 gas cards lets say in a 60 card deck, you would have a 6 in 60 chance of drawing a gas card. That would be a 10% chance. I think that's right. The tough part would be for someone to get a complete deck of all cards or get the list off the net and break it down card by card... If some one had ALOT of time they could figure out every set combination and make one for each. I wish I could figure out how to code, you could input all the cards by set and the user can click what sets they are using and the program can calculate it for you.

[sickboy]

If someone can do me a list of all the cards, how many in each set, etc i can do the clever bit and knock something together in excel that will calculate it all for you.

Actually, if we could somehow collate some data on the average number of turns there are in a game then we could also work out the probability of a particular mission being a success.

For example if you have a fifty card deck and there are 2 of the target cards in there, and we work out the mean number if turns in a game is 8 then the probability of success is:

Turn one 2/50 = 0.04
Turn two 2/49 = 0.041
Turn three 2/48 = 0.042
Turn four 2/47 = 0.043
Turn five 2/46 = 0.043
Turn six 2/45 = 0.044
Turn seven 2/44 = 0.045
Turn eight 2/43 = 0.047

Total that up and the probability of drawing that particular card in an average game is 0.345 or 34.5%

[aldrichgreg]

I am a huge statistics nerd, but not very mathematically inclined myself, so am merely cheerleading your endeavors here.

[fitzgrimm]

Ok so it is not leting me post the excel doc so I well have to try convert this over to something else or just copy and paste it into a post.

[friskers96]

Can always dump it in the DL section. Will excel allow you to convert into pdf?

[fitzgrimm]

I don't know if you can convert to pdf from excel. I well get the stats up one way or the other sometime next week.